The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for public attitude analysis. More particularly but not exclusively, the present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for extracting and analyzing public attitude relevant data.
Modern organizations spend billions of dollars on Public Relations (PR) and advertisement campaigns in order to bring to the public a message, create a positive atmosphere, and influence stakeholders, opinion leaders and customers.
However, measuring the impact imposed by such campaigns on the public is very difficult.
Traditional methods for measuring or predicting the impact imposed by public campaigns on the public are inherently limited.
For example, Consumer marketing research includes both attitudinal and behavioral market research. Consumer marketing research generally refers to the study of consumers and their purchasing habits and activities.
Attitudinal research generally includes studies that focus on understanding consumers and how consumers make purchasing decisions. Attitudinal research can be defined as research that represents a person's ideas, convictions or liking with respect to a specific object or idea. Opinions are essentially expressions of attitudes. Consequently, attitudes and opinions can be used almost interchangeably to represent a person's ideas, convictions or liking with respect to a specific object or idea. Collecting consumer purchasing information allows, for example, product manufacturers, to drill down to human purchasing dispositions. Attitudinal research may assist in determining the likelihood of product purchase, how future products can be improved, whether product changes are acceptable, etc.
Behavioral research can be defined as the study of consumer behavior. Behavioral research studies what people do, that is, how people act.
Behavioral data, reflecting what consumers actually purchase in the marketplace, as opposed to what researchers infer consumers will or will not purchase, has always been available. However, comprehensive behavioral data is not always easy to capture for a variety of reasons.
The field of consumer marketing research which includes attitudinal and behavioral market research requires gathering data related to, for example, consumer attitudes and consumer behavior, in order to analyze such attitudes and behavior. Consumer data may be gathered through the distribution of incentive items activated via participation in consumer research programs and consumer surveys, such as the ones described in U.S. Patent Publication 20030070338, entitled: “Removable label and incentive item to facilitate collecting consumer data”. However, incentive based methods may produce biased results.
Prior art methods for measuring public attitudes include conducting polls on a presumably representative sample of target audiences. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,950,618 entitled: “System for Public Opinion research” describes an automatic system for processing a public opinion poll. However, such methods are based on an assumption that such samples are indeed representative of the target audiences.
Another popular prior art method for evaluating public attitudes which is very often employed involves focus group techniques. A focus group is a group of people, presumed to be representative of a target population, such as parents or customers, gathered to provide answers to open-ended questions on specific topics and share their opinions.
Prior Art lacks methods for capturing public attitudes which do not rely on the careful selection of a representative sample or the actual behavior and the availability of comprehensive data pertaining to the actual behavior.
Prior art has so far failed to incorporate public attitude spread by word of mouth, specifically as far as the Internet is concerned. The web added a new dimension to the media mix—online news groups, discussion groups, forums, chats and blogs—are all forms of communications that did not exist ten years ago, and today they are an inseparable part of the media mix. The public is an inseparable part of the media. The public is fed from the media and feeds the media through its new means of communication.
There is thus a widely recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have an apparatus and method for extracting and analyzing public attitude data which is devoid of the above limitations.